Of old times the rich man rode into battle, shirted with mail, covered and shielded with iron from head to foot. Arrows glanced from him as from a stone. He came home unhurt and covered with "glory." But the poor, in his leathern jerkin or his linen frock, confronted the war, where every weapon tore his unprotected flesh. In the modern, perennial battle with disease, the same thing takes place; the poor fall and die.
The destruction of the poor is their poverty. They are ignorant, not from choice but necessity. They cannot, therefore, look round and see the best way of doing things, of saving their strength, and sparing their means. They can have little of what we call thrift, the brain in the hand for which our people are so remarkable. Some of them are also little by nature, ill-born; others well born enough, were abandoned in childhood, and have not since been able to make up the arrears of a neglected youth. They are to fight the great battle of life, for battle it is to them, with feeble arms. Look at the houses they live in, without comfort or convenience, without sun, or air, or water; damp, cold, filthy and crowded to excess. In one section of the city there are thirty-seven persons on an average in each house.
Consider the rents paid by this class of our brothers. It is they who pay the highest rate for their dwellings. The worth of the house is often little more than nothing, the ground it covers making the only value. I am told that twelve or fifteen per cent a year on a large valuation is quite commonly paid, and over thirty per cent on the actual value, is not a strange thing. I wish this might not prove true.
But the misery of the poor does not end with their wretched houses and exorbitant rent. Having neither capital nor store-room, they must purchase articles of daily need in the smallest quantities. They buy, therefore, at the greatest disadvantage, and yet at the dearest rates. I am told it is not a rare thing for them to buy inferior qualities of flour at six cents a pound, or $11.88 a barrel, while another man buys a month's supply at a time for $4 or $5 a barrel. This may be an extreme case, but I know that in some places in this city, an inferior article is now retailed to them at $7.92 the barrel. So it is with all kinds of food; they are bought in the smallest quantities, and at a rate which a rich man would think ruinous. Is not the poor man, too, most often cheated in the weight and the measure? So it is whispered. "He has no friends," says the sharper; "others have broken him to fragments, I will grind him to powder!" And the grinding comes.
Such being the case, the poor man finds it difficult to get a cent beforehand. I know rich men tell us that capital is at the mercy of labor. That may be prophecy; it is not history; not fact. Uneducated labor, brute force without skill, is wholly at the mercy of capital. The capitalist can control the market for labor, which is all the poor man has to part with. The poor cannot combine as the rich. True, a mistake is sometimes made, and the demand for labor is greater than the supply, and the poor man's wages are increased. This result was doubtless God's design, but was it man's intention? The condition of the poor has hitherto been bettered, not so much by the design of the strong, as by God making their wrath and cupidity serve the weak.
Under such circumstances, what marvel that the poor man becomes unthrifty, reckless and desperate? I know how common it is to complain of the extravagance of the poor. Often there is reason for the complaint. It is a wrong thing, and immoral, for a man with a dependent family to spend all his earnings, if it be possible to live with less. I think many young men are much to be blamed, for squandering all their wages to please a dainty palate, or to dress as fine as a richer man, making only the heart of their tailor foolishly glad. Such men may not be poor now, but destine themselves to be the fathers of poor children. After making due allowance, it must be confessed that much of the recklessness of the poor comes unavoidably from their circumstances; from their despair of ever being comfortable, except for a moment at a time. Every one knows that unmerited wealth tempts a man to squander, while few men know, what is just as true, that hopeless poverty does the same thing. As the tortured Indian will sleep, if his tormentor pause but a moment, so the poor man, grown reckless and desperate, forgets the future storms, and wastes in revel the solitary gleam of sunlight which falls on him. It is nature speaking through his soul.
Now consider the moral temptations before such men. Here is wealth, food, clothing, comfort, luxury, gold, the great enchanter of this age, and but a plank betwixt it and them. Nay, they are shut from it only by a pane of glass thin as popular justice, and scarcely less brittle! They feel the natural wants of man; the artificial wants of men in cities. They are indignant at their social position, thrust into the mews and the kennels of the land. They think some one is to blame for it. A man in New England does not believe it God's will he should toil for ever, stinting and sparing only to starve the more slowly to death, overloaded with work, with no breathing time but the blessed Sunday. They see others doing nothing, idle as Solomon's lilies, yet wasting the unearned bread God made to feed the children of the poor. They see crowds of idle women elegantly clad, a show of loveliness, a rainbow in the streets, and think of the rag which does not hide their daughter's shame. They hear of thousands of baskets of costly wine imported in a single ship, not brought to recruit the feeble, but to poison the palate of the strong. They begin to ask if wealthy men and wise men have not forgotten their brothers, in thinking of their own pleasure! It is not the poor alone who ask that. In the midst of all this, what wonder is it if they feel desirous of revenge; what wonder that stores and houses are broken into, and stables set afire! Such is the natural effect of misery like that; it is but the voice of our brother's blood crying to God against us all. I wonder not that it cries in robbery and fire. The jail and the gallows will not still that voice, nor silence the answer. I wonder at the fewness of crimes, not their multitude. I must say that, if goodness and piety did not bear a greater proportion to the whole development of the poor than the rich, their crimes would be tenfold. The nation sets the poor an example of fraud, by making them pay highest on all local taxes; of theft, by levying the national revenue on persons, not property. Our navy and army set them the lesson of violence; and, to complete their schooling, at this very moment we are robbing another people of cities and lands, stealing, burning, and murdering, for lust of power and gold. Everybody knows that the political action of a nation is the mightiest educational influence in that nation. But such is the doctrine the State preaches to them, a constant lesson of fraud, theft, violence and crime. The literature of the nation mocks at the poor, laughing in the popular journals at the poor man's inevitable crime. Our trade deals with the poor as tools, not men. What wonder they feel wronged! Some city missionary may dawdle the matter as he will; tell them it is God's will they should be dirty and ignorant, hungry, cold and naked. Now and then a poor woman starving with cold and hunger may think it true. But the poor know better; ignorant as they are, they know better. Great Nature speaks when you and I are still. They feel neglected, wronged, and oppressed. What hinders them from following the example set by the nation, by society, by the strong? Their inertness, their cowardice, and, what does not always restrain abler men, their fear of God! With cultivated men, the intellect is often developed at the expense of conscience and religion. With the poor this is more seldom the case.
The misfortunes of the poor do not end here. To make their degradation total, their name infamous, we have shut them out of our churches. Once in our Puritan meeting-houses, there were "body seats" for the poor; for a long time free galleries, where men sat and were not ashamed. Now it is not so. A Christian society about to build a church, and having $50,000, does not spend $40,000 for that, making it a church for all, and keep $10,000 as a fund for the poor. No, it borrows $30,000 more, and then shuts the poor out of its bankrupt aisles. A high tower, or a fine-toned bell, yes, marble and mahogany, are thought better than the presence of these little ones whom God wills not to perish. I have heard ministers boast of the great men, and famous, who sat under their preaching; never one who boasted that the poor came into his church, and were fed, body and soul! You go to our churches—the poor are not in them. They are idling and lounging away their day of rest, like the horse and the ox. Alas me, that the apostles, that the Christ himself could not worship in our churches, till he sold his garment and bought a pew! Many of our houses of public worship would be well named, "Churches for the affluent." Yet religion is more to the poor man than to the rich. What wonder then, if the poor lose self-respect, when driven from the only churches where it is thought respectable to pray!
This class of men are perishing; yes, perishing in the nineteenth century; perishing in Boston, wealthy, charitable Boston; perishing soul and body, contrary to God's will; and perishing all the worse because they die slow, and corrupt by inches. As things now are, their mortality is hardly a curse. The Methodists are right in telling them this world is a valley of tears; it is almost wholly so to them; and Heaven a long June day, full of rest and plenty. To die is their only gain; their only hope. Think of that, you who murmur because money is "tight," because your investment gives only twenty per cent. a year, or because you are taxed for half your property, meaning to move off next season; think of that, you who complain because the democrats are in power to-day, and you who tremble lest the whigs shall be in '49; think of that, you who were never hungry, nor athirst; who are sick, because you have nothing else to do, and grumble against God, from mere emptiness of soul, and for amusement's sake; think of men, who, if wise, do not dare to raise the human prayer for life, but for death, as the only gain, the only hope, and you will give over your complaint, your hands stopping your mouth.
What shall become of the children of such men? They stand in the fore-front of the battle, all unprotected as they are; a people scattered and peeled, only a miserable remnant reaches the age of ten! Look about your streets, and see what does become of such as live, vagrant and idle boys. Ask the police, the constables, the jails; they shall tell you what becomes of the sons. Will a white lily grow in a common sewer; can you bleach linen in a tan-pit? Yes, as soon as you can rear a virtuous population, under such circumstances. Go to any State Prison in the land, and you shall find that seven-eighths of the convicts came from this class, brought there by crimes over which they had no control; crimes which would have made you and me thieves and pirates. The characters of such men are made for them, far more than by them. There is no more vice, perhaps, born into that class; they have no more "inherited sin" than any other class in the land; all the difference, then, between the morals and manners of rich and poor, is the result of education and circumstances.